[3] It was followed by two short story collections (Our Lieutenant, 1955, There Were Two Friends, 1958), a novella (The Inheritors, 1957) and Divizionka (Division Newspaper), a 1959 book of documentary non-fiction.

His 1961 novel The Cherry-Сoloured Pool, about the life of Russian village, was welcomed by Mikhail Sholokhov, whom Alekseyev later cited as a major influence.

The two-part novel Unweeping Willow (1970, 1974), a vast panorama of the 1930s-1960s rural Soviet Privolzhye, earned him the USSR State Prize in 1976.

Of the films based upon Alekseyev's novels, the best known are director Nikolai Moskalenko's Zhuravushka (1968, after Bread Is a Noun) and Russian Field (1971, Unweeping Willow).

"I've made my mind to write only of the things I myself witnessed while fighting in the Autumn 1942 and Winter 1943 between Don and Volga, without making anything up," he explained.

As a Moskva magazine's editor-in-chief he published Nikolay Karamzin's History of the Russian State in full, which at the time was regarded as a daring challenge to academician Alexander Yakovlev, perestroika's main ideologist.

Outraged by the demolition of the Russian Duma in October 1993, he reacted with the series of angry articles published by Zavtra, Sovetskaya Rossiya and Pravda.